by Eurydice (c) 1999
Why Clinton's Sex Life is His Greatest Political Legacy
A great president is a trick of destiny: a man of whom an extraordinary circumstance (war, economic depression, social upheaval) exacts a terrible sacrifice or test of courage and compassion. A great president does not merely preside over the best economy in 50 years, respond to the needs of his constituents, balance the budget, open new trade routes; rather, he presides over the reshaping of the consciousness and self-understanding of his nation. He is the hero of a great moral tale who, by fateful example, acts out the answers to the most poignant questions that afflict his people. Bill Clinton has, despite everyone's expectations, become such a president. He has built himself a legacy out of his very flaws.
It was not Clinton's political intent, however ambitious he may have been, to give direction to our moral questioning, any more than it was JFK's intent to be venerated for what the shock of his assassination taught America. Clinton is a Washington outsider with a colorful past and a cheesy accent, son of a promiscuous single mother and an abusive alcoholic stepfather in small-town Arkansas. His presidency is a historical anomaly and he's been under metastasizing investigations throughout his career. Republicans resent him for implementing their political agenda, effectively castrating their party platform and leaving them prey to the far right. Liberals resent him for curbing their unsustainable traditional policies. He's widely viewed as a sophist, superficial and mercurial, egregiously adept at quelling crises, a trickster with a gift for manipulating words and emotions who lacks the puritan prudence of less-is-always-best and invites the personalization, and trivialization, of his office.
But now Clinton's greatest political achievement may turn out to be that he exposed our 'politically correct' sexual superpropriety for the reactionary repression it is, inadvertedly marking the conclusion of our frenzied 'he said, she said' sexual finger-pointing and putting a stop to the McCarthyist sex scare that has usurped America's daily life and made us afraid of expressing desire for strangers or colleagues. However deplored in its narrow context, Clinton's exemplary contribution is to have followed his lust undaunted by vast attendant risks at a time of general sexual paranoia, gender wars, legal persecutions-even as he was noisily sued for sexual impropriety. His main political legacy may turn out to be precisely his clumsy personal conduct which has revealed, in unequivocal terms, that the American people are not shockable by expressions of human sexuality. His Bimbogate has made it clear that in a democracy sex isn't and shouldn't be a public issue; that the right to a private life overrides individual and collective definitions of sexual morality; that carnal desire is unchartable and should be relegated to the uncertain realm of the soul; that sexuality is, and will always be, and for the best, undefinable, spontaneous, subjective, unruly, irrational, a socially sanctioned zone of personal freedom and a repository of our unconscious excesses. If an attitude of enlightened wonder and merciful openness defines our new morality, we'll owe a lot of it to Clinton's defenseless humanity.
74% of Americans believe Clinton will be remembered for his sex scandal more than any other achievement. According to how his saga unfolds, he'll become a deliverer or a martyr and stop being seen as a depraved predator and shuffling libertine. And the nation will either gain a newly expanded moral and sexual independence, or will be returned to the days when Churches had political power and controlled people's private lives and thoughts, in the familiar, frustrating, meaningless struggle to conquer, even deny, our nature. This is the fight that rages in America now: the demand for sexual emancipation, which has shaken up the moral marrow of the nation since the 1960s, is pitted against a sanctimonious status quo that feels unduly threatened by the moral unrest and wants to turn the tide in on itself. It's an epic battle between puritanism and free will, capitalism and humanism, arrogance and humility-the conflicting urges in America's heart.
We live in a time of great moral unrest. Sin is dead, fear, confession, loss of intimacy, refuge in law, self-labeling, judgment, eras otherwise forgotten, what is private and what public of a culture in flux. Our sexual morality is an incoherent collection of contradictory laws bequeathed to us from eras otherwise forgotten. In the last few decades we've been inventing a new ethos, and have faltered and exaggerated in the process of our sexual demystification. America has needed a sexually defining moment: thanks to Clinton, now it has one. Clinton's legal harassment may well be the last of the extreme vacillations of a culture in flux, which is looking to redefine what is private and public, and to find a more tolerant moral balance and sexual comfort. What is at stake is not whether Clinton will serve two more years as President; what is at risk is a great deal of individual freedom for us all.
Skeptics would say, as I often did, that what did the Clintons in was hubris. (I myself said countless times in the past 6 months that the president should have paid Paula Jones $200,000, as Bennett advised him to do, and offered to personally pay the money for him, and swept this ugly side of our media-circus under the rag. He has been quoted as saying at the time, 'I won't let them get to me.' They could be the words of a Nixonian paranoid, a delusional Napoleon, or a fighter.) Skeptics would say the Clintons played right into the hands of political enemies and allowed the country to enter a relative standstill, where the shenanigans of a corpulent indiscreet intern with the president too all emphasis and air out of the important political issues of the day and put the nation's affairs on hold. I myself complained many times in the past 6 months that sex is being used to throw dust in the public's eyes and distract us from essential affective issues, such as the side-effects of technology, usury, the Asian economy, the military-industrial consolidations, NAFTA and the budget, the list is endless. This struck me as single-issue governing, like running the country on a pro-life or pro-abortion stance or NRA solidarity or opposition etc. What changed my mind were the overwhelmingly positive popularity polls. The worse the treatment Clinton received at the hands of busybodies and self-styled bedroom snoops and moral police, the more pervasive the public support he got. The more dirty deeds it was revealed he engaged in with a 19-year-old, from the oral to the anal but always excluding the 'sexual,' the more he was understood and forgiven and accepted by the people. I realized this was an extraordinary phenomenon.
Hubris is the very meat of tragedy. Tragedy is a moral lesson, manifested through the trial of a great or merely powerful or well-meaning man through one simple human flaw (usually hubris-too much pride, arrogance, self-confidence, conceit, smarts) that leads to his shame and undoing. Basic timeless stuff. It's how the gods work, the mess of human living. We fall, we learn. Tragedy is a shortcut: the hero falls, we learn. Aristotle said the audience learned by feeling pity and fear about what was taking place on stage-and by extension about their own fates and choices which those in the audience felt compelled to reexamine. Aristotle, the West's educator par excellence and the teacher of history's first modern American, Alexander the Great, put in memorable lucid terms what civilization had practiced and depended on for its inner evolution from the very beginning.
Clinton took the fall for us all. And by this he showed us what we did and didn't believe in, what we could and couldn't stomach, where we stood and where were our limits. This is what he meant, not knowing it, when he labeled himself, in his quest for wide-base politically safe monikers, the Education president. He is presiding over our moral education. And it is my deep sense at this moment that a great, long-overdue shift has begun to take place in our understanding of our sexual morality.
Clinton's hubris opened the way for the substitution of his personal dramas for political ones. Had he kept his silence regarding his private life non-negotiable, he would have earned greater respect. He bit the bait because he'd been persecuted unfairly too long and survived it. And by answering the first prurient question, he permitted the deletion of boundaries between his public and private life and the erosion of his freedoms. He played into the hands of his pursuers and let them toss the country into a standstill where the shenanigans of an indiscreet intern took the air out of the issues of the day and put national affairs on hold. Because he was afraid of appearing as if he had something to hide, even as he did have something to hide, he challenged his fate too hard.
Hubris is the wheel of tragedy. Hubris is behind the undoing of every great man, woman, race or empire ever undone. Tragedy works on precedent: if a great man can be ruined by a minor, even unconscious, transgression, imagine what can happen to us. The underlying end of any tragedy is to turn the low thrill we get from another's persecution against us; use our voyeurism to terrorize us. But in a democracy, the audience has the choice of rewriting the rules; revolutionary tragedies ('Antigone' or 'Philoctetes') teach us that our civic rules are cruel and unworkable and must be changed. It's the less passive meaning of precedent: if we punish our leaders for natural flaws, we'll be accountable to the same impossible, intrusive standards of moral flawlessness in the name of justice.
A tragedy is a dire warning. Clinton's is not an individual misfortune. It implicitly serves a major social purpose: it warns the populace away from the thirst for sexual freedom. It is meant to evoke pity and plant fear in us all, restrict how we live and think in private, and place our sturdiest and most precarious impulses under submission. His alleged perjury and obstruction of justice and abuse of power are flimsy euphemisms our culture is using to mask a much larger project: the sexualization of our public life-the use of sex to distract us from serious political issues-and the desexualization of our private life-the use of law to alienate us from serious personal desires and instincts.
Clinton's trial exposes to us the failure of our legal system, our moral structures, our political representation to adjust to the change in our sexual morality; it reminds us that sexual freedom is the private face of America's faith in individualism, entrepreneurship, courage and overcoming the odds; it alerts us to the danger of the criminalization of our everyday life. His tragedy leaves us two redeeming choices: either we all agree that consensual sex is a private matter and should no longer be fodder for gossip at any level of our public discourse-no Jerry Springers, no Gary Harts; or we all bring our sex lives into the open, as feminists and sex activists attempted to do, and are free to admit guiltlessly and fearlessly any detail of our libidinous and orgasmic experiences with full impunity. This is the spiritual revival and the ethical conversion Starr's America is ripe for.
I believe Clinton's greatest political achievement to date consists in unveiling our p.c. sexual propriety for the unconvincing puritanical hypocrisy it is. Clinton's unconscious political contribution was to follow his sexual desire despite the vast attendant risks at a time of sexual persecution, in the midst of a prejudiced sexual-impropriety lawsuit. His greatest political legacy will be having revealed in unequivocal terms, and hopefully once and for all, that the American people are no longer naive and innocent and easily shockable by the expressions of human sexuality. He has made it clear, however clumsily, that in a democracy sex isn't and shouldn't be a public issue.
"ADULTERY IS THE ONLY SIN IN THE BOURGEOIS LIFE." FLAUBERT
Adultery is a drama about change. Sometimes it ends with the philanderer's sheepish return to the emotional deadness he tried desperately and recklessly to escape, the unhappiness that, after enough social upbraiding or romantic insecurity, he reconstrues as a happy ending; other times it overcomes its enforced secrecy to chart new venues of optimism and experimentation. As an instigator for social change, the presidential adultery is useful. Its media-flattened plot reduces human experience to assumptions and formulas that for centuries have been used, worn out and cast into empty forms and brings them conspicuously to our judgment. Beyond that, it is a drawing-room tragicomedy in which no one has a long-term vision, everyone acts in self-defense, love is a euphemism for self-interest, and America at best embarrasses itself and at worst disintegrates. Call it MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. This is what the national audience has to work with:
The hero, Bill: a man of tempestuous appetites and sisyphean contradictions, a preppy slouch and easygoing workaholic, cowardly and overconfident, suave and vulgar, compassionate and manipulative, sexy and entertaining. He's the story's Everyman Rex. He represents us all. He reminds us that we really want a stable home, a kind wife, a good kid, a job we take pride in, and a legacy of our being to survive us; and from time to time, we also want to be Lotharios, Picassos, gypsies, rapists, lumberjacks. Bill's charisma is that he humanizes politics. The ideal celebrity, he is accessible, adaptable, fallible, and bigger-than-life; he doesn't shy away from danger, the quotidian, or the absurd. He conducts statesman's duties with dignity and zest, even as 51/2" penis jokes proliferate in offices and on the Net. He is needy, overeager, undisciplined, enthusiastic, self-destructive, and embodies the most primitive, true data about ourselves. He personifies our brilliance, vulnerability, good intentions, sensuality. He is a full human being and a powerful archetype; and so the twists of his fortune claim our attention.
The wild card: Hillary, the spurned wife, the innocent casualty, the political mastermind. Her role is unclear: Bill's infidelity gives her the moral authority he's lost and renders her irreproachable. She is empowered by his deception. She has the power to save or sink her husband by publicly condoning or berating him. She is Jason's wife who burns by Medea's wrath and she is Medea; she can be Phaedra or Ariadne, Penelope or Clytemnestra. She is not a simple archetype. She's a bossy phallocrat, a cold strategist, a formidable queen-bee, a feminist reformer, a caring mother, a loyal companion, an abused spouse concerned with saving face, a moral paragon whose book regurgitated social clichés that dated back to the 1950s. She has broken every cliché we've constructed in the past 30 years about feminism, individuality and happiness. Her marriage is either free of possessiveness, open to outside sexual exploration, potentially utopian; or a sexually numb partnership of convenience based on common professional and ideological interests and histories, like the vast majority of lifelong marriages worldwide. For the scandalmongers, she represents the nation: the wronged partner, the duped insecure wife continually suspecting and fearing perfidy and ridicule. She reminded self-aggrandizing White House aides, Democrats, and network anchors who claimed to feel betrayed by Bill, that betrayal couldn't be impersonal, that a politician's disloyalty to marriage vows doesn't stand for his infidelity to the electorate.
The heroine, Monica: the big-haired, big-titted, big-mouthed cartoonish tragic facilitator, the gun in the first scene that has to go off by the end of the play; a temptress with a mike-wearing best-friend and a mother in charge of hiding her presidential-semen-stained dress, she draws her self-esteem from her sex appeal, convinced she has little to offer beyond her youth and exuberance. Nymphets are interchangeable but dramatically indispensable, put on stage to teach us the might of fate; as superficial instruments of doom they let themselves be used, revel in being exploited and exploitable, and, when miffed, become Democlitian swords. It's the moral lesson of Last Tango in Paris: bored upper middle class young sirens can be obliviously lethal.
The first time Monica Lewinsky is face to face with the President, she shows him her thong. It's a cunning, attention-getting surprise attack: she spooks, shocks, and challenges him with a direct primal dare to his manhood. She instinctively knows what feminists have neglected: that sex involves a transfer of power between the parties involved; that people of unequal power find their disymmetry sexy. She goes to the White House with the plan to seduce the President; she wants to turn the icon into the 50-year-old mortal male so she can obtain a modicum of control over him and bask in his power. She uses easy favors to satisfy her vanity and immoderate sense of entitlement. She first confesses having a 'crush' on him, using dead-end adolescent terminology in order to appeal to the 'little boy' in him. She kisses him. He protests that he's trying 'to be good.' She takes more initiative. She performs oral sex casually, unemotionally. He's haunted by shame at every step and tries to end it. She hopes to break up his marriage and tell the world of her conquest. She remains the aggressor, pressuring him to 'complete' a single act of oral sex. When he does trust her enough to give her pleasure and love-talk and ejaculate, he gives her the means to blackmail him. When he finally realizes she is unreliable and ends the affair, she throws tantrums to force her way into the White House. She refuses to sign her affidavit until she's offered a job she deems worthy ($60,000 for no work). She is not exploited, she exploits.
Showing their buttcracks to the President isn't typical behavior for America's daughters. But Bill's bilious castigators ask for his punishment in the name of America's children, as if he were a pederast. But age differences among adults don't translate into differences in culpability.
At 22, Monica is a decade older than Lolita and could be a mother. She is eligible to drink, vote, serve in the military, make adult moral decisions. She has a history of adulterous affairs with older men in positions of power. She's an unpaid volunteer sponsored by a party contributor, not a subordinate. The implication that her age contributes to the moral outrage reveals a formal disrespect for youth's right to sexual equality and responsibility; a puritanical, patronizing sexual censorship that masquerades as protectiveness; and a fear of admitting unalterable instincts we all share. The assumption is that a young woman is familial and social property, that female sexuality is incapable of initiative. The honor of a nation's daughters is a touchy issue, since the most savage wars have been waged on that excuse (Goebbels' newspaper scared the German countryside with images of the sexual perversities visited by Jewish men on Aryan women). The notion that women are in a position of sexual weakness and need to be protected discredits gender equality and threatens sexuality. Our women's organizations that bewail Bill's exploitation of Monica or treat her as a victim of sexual opportunism are myopic and misogynist. By either portraying her as a victim or a slut, we deny her sexual freedom and her sexual choices.
Monica becomes a victim of abuse when she is surrounded by FBI agents while eating in a restaurant and taken away to be questioned about having sex with Bill. The older, more powerful man who corners and exploits her is Mr. Starr: he pressures her with months of leaks, threats, indignities (he subpoenas her Mom), salacious innuendoes; he ransacks her computer, steals letters she's never mailed, forces her to proclaim the pornographic coordinates of her life. He exposes her inner life to public view, humiliates her, and leaves her to hang. She becomes the national harlot. She loses her friends, credibility, peace of mind. She is the victim of legal sexual assault.
The motiveless malignity, Starr: the blind seer who makes the bad news, the manic provocateur, Iago; driven to recreate the world in his own skewed image and sense of justice, he relishes the sportsmanship of playing God. The son of a Texas fundamentalist preacher, he is our out-of-touch incarnation of Inquisition judge and theocrat, puritan pornographer, Cotton Mather whose triumph in 1692 was also predicated on the testimony of sexually hysterical girls. He knowingly takes on a federal office he considers unconstitutional in order to dig up dirt on Bill better than his predecessor; he has a moment of reckoning and nearly abandons witch-hunting to teach law, but his Darth Vader mien prevails. Oddly obsessed with obscenity, he interrogates Bill only on insular sex acts and neglects graver sources of possible scandal, collects scattershot evidence, rearranges it to incriminate Bill, blows it out of proportion, blows his trumpet and generally functions as Master of Ceremonies, in charge of keeping the drama alive via orchestrated leaks, grand gestures, charges of moral degeneration, and promises of voyeuristic pleasures. The largest part of his job, like Iago's, is novelistic: he shores up a fictional legal case with reams of irrelevant X-rated anecdotes aimed to offend public sentiment. Instead of a judicial report, he presents an ornate, riveted, dramatized expose of an exhaustingly reiterated single infraction: a man may have touched the breasts and genitals of a woman not his wife and said that he hadn't. But Starr is a peon. Like the rest of the accusers-Scaife-type paranoids, ad-hoc conservatives-he is useful only by his success. His personal fate is unimportant; concealing his human frailty, he has no claim on our sympathy.
The evil stepmother, Linda Tripp: Starr's little helper, the female Iago, cry-wolf chatter-box. She vows to 'bring down the White House,' brings her tapes to Starr, urges Monica to keep up the affair when Bill wants to end it, tells Monica to store the Gap dress in a safe deposit box and lends her clothes so she won't wear it again, advises Monica to ask Clinton's best friend for a job in exchange for her affidavit, and so on, and gives the longest grand jury testimony. She's a minor instrument of fate, discardable and peripheral once the frame-up is brought to our attention.
The chorus: the press corps. Their job is to sustain our interest during interludes in action or periods where the action happens off stage, and tell us how to read the unfolding drama correctly, direct our sympathies to the appropriate targets, shame us into abandoning our subjectivity. With the commitment and austerity of undertakers, they pry where they don't belong, apply to Bill a standard never applied to his predecessors, and turn public discourse into a game of 'gotcha!' The reporters who create vicarious excitement and infectious urgency by labeling each flimsy lawsuit 'Presidency in Crisis' and billing it top news every day for months, draw self-importance and a rush of power by shaping history; they emulate the modern Polonius, the eternal busybody now driven by ratings, spin doctors and competition for an ever-smaller audience.. The media, which purportedly gives the public what it wants, is undeniably mercenary; it has a vested capitalist interest in turning politics and sex into Coliseum-style spectator sports; its ultimate goal is to convert the sex instinct into the instinct to consume, because sex is socially useful as a floating image that sells everything from milk to news. Bill's scandal triples the ratings of all-news cable stations, boosts the sales of computers and Internet news services, quadruples the circulation of book titles Monica gave Bill, raises cigar sales by 110%. As this market-driven explicit moral relativism overrides our worst moral pretensions, it also obliterates our best American freedoms. The imagination of any chorus is minimal. Like the news it covers, it's hopelessly ephemeral.
The second role the media plays is more sinister: talking about sex provides our culture with the means to regulate sex, to tell us what we shouldn't do. Discourse inevitably legislates and systematizes sex; so, as the industrial world becomes the information world, information becomes our new means of repression. We know more about sex than ever before, but are not any closer to making sex guilt-free, unrestrained and wholesome. In place of desire, we feel unease. Instead of gratification, we find addiction. And despite all our talk, we feel little secure and at home in our overinterpreted world. Politicizing sex is a right-wing strategy: the scheme was devised two millennia ago in monasteries; for centuries Christianity prescribed the task of putting everything sexual-consummated acts, sensations, gazes, remarks, thoughts-to speech as our fundamental duty. The Enlightenment secularized the practice. Our media has made it its staple. We are now self-exploited, getting our kicks from watching ourselves and hearing each other confess. Starr's massive meandering investigation is a distressing proof of the legitimization of public sexual prying.
The plot complications: a sequence of fated errors. Bill makes the blunder of not vetoing the unconstitutional office of special prosecutor, which will probably be abolished once Bill is skewered, because he must look committed to the absurd cause of 'truth in politics,' to prove he has nothing to hide even as he is pervasively investigated and demonized. He makes the mistake of endorsing a federal bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Susan Molinari that allows juries in sexual-assault cases to consider similar past offenses by the defendant, which makes the sexual history of the accuser off-limits and that of the accused admissible evidence. The Supreme Court makes the potentially destabilizing error to allow the questionable Paula Jones civil suit ((financed by Clinton-haters intent on overturning the Presidency) to go to court while Bill is President; the ruling is meant to ensure 'no one is above the law,' as if any presidential investigation could be impartial or nonpartisan. Because their harassment lawsuit is weak (Jones was not fired, demoted, deprived of benefits), lawyers amend their complaint to fit the new federal rules and show Bill has a pattern of sexual misbehavior to corroborate Jones's new claim of an unwelcome sexual assault.
Monica makes the mistake of telling eleven friends about her affair; one, Tripp, tapes their private phone conversations illegally and takes them to Starr who passes them to Jones's lawyers in collusion, though they're inadmissible in court. When Monica is subpoenaed as one of seven 'Jane Doe's, Bill makes the mistake of refusing to settle, as he's advised to; rather than default and pay $200,000, he decides to be exonerated beyond any doubt; giving Jones the apology she demands, would imply his culpability, confirm the smears, and embarrass his family. He wrongly chooses to answer the Lewinsky questions rather than take the Fourth, out of fear of encouraging new insinuations. Monica makes the mistake of giving a deposition, instead of defying the subpoena and going abroad until the end of the case as another Jane Doe does. After the Jones suit is dismissed, Starr takes Tripp's tampered tapes to Attorney General, Janet Reno, who wrongly gives him permission to investigate Monica's claim to Tripp, quickly revealed to have been a self-aggrandizing lie, that she was given a job in exchange for her silence; grand juries are not convened to investigate alleged perjury about adultery in a deposition in a dismissed civil case, but Reno is afraid of appearing to shield Clinton. Starr sets a perjury trap for Bill. Tripp, wiretapped, asks Monica leading questions, and her answers bring in the FBI. Monica makes the error of changing her earlier testimony, instead of claiming she made things up to trick Tripp; Starr has no evidence to convict her, and appeals can carry her to the end of Clinton's term when he'd pardon her. She's already notorious without bringing him down; at the end of his term she can publish a tell-all memoir for a $10 million advance; or revive their romance. She caves in out of fear, self-delusion, or spite at his public denials of the affair. He does adamantly deny it under political and domestic pressure. She makes the mistake of producing the incriminating dress that breaks Bill's silence after she gets immunity, rather than bide her time, let the November elections take place, and use her evidence wisely. The DC Court of Appeals makes the error of asking the Secret Service to testify against the institution of the presidency, which implies a president's bodyguards are the eyes and ears of his detractors. At the culmination of these inane blunders, Bill is advised not to appear before the grand jury, since a civil deposition is not legal grounds for perjury (a civil case by definition involves two parties one of whom is lying); but he fears the public won't respect a president taking the Fourth or Fifth Amendment. He agrees to let Starr videotape his testimony when a grand juror is absent, because he refuses to appear unpresidential. He's advised to say as little as possible, but as commander in chief he must appear accountable. He admits the affair, but denies committing perjury, a victimless crime which would expose him to impeachment.
Once he acknowledges his 'inappropriate' intimacy, he forfeits his legal rights. If he could go to court, he would be vindicated as there's no evidence of a prosecutable crime; but a sitting President can't be indicted; he is at the mercy of a zealous Republican Congress, which isn't limited by the rule of law and is free to interpret the definition of the 'high crimes and misdemeanors' against the nation which make a president impeachable. But every lurid imputation is broadcast on TV in a blatant abuse of due process and disseminated at face-value in paperbacks in every airport lounge; his secret grand jury testimony is televised before Congress even decides whether to proceed with impeachment hearings, and its most embarrassing snippets will be featured in campaign ads. This record on the basis of which the public is urged to judge him and pronounce him incompetent to rule represents one side of the story acquired without cross-examination, the side any rational observer would tend to disfavor; it pits the unauthoritative claims of an impressionable, insolent idler who admittedly 'can lie her way out of anything' and who has been granted full unaccountability when testifying against the President, against the claims of the elected leader of the nation, and, as some put it, of the free world, an emblem of American power.
Bill's crime centers on his definition of sex. He testifies he did not have sex with Monica. He later admits they had 'intimate relations' and sexual banter, but not sex. This is his lie, because of which foes call him 'genetically incapable of telling the truth.' She confirms he did not have intercourse with her and ejaculated twice during ten alleged encounters. But if he did put his penis in her mouth and his cigar in her vagina and his hands on her nipples, he only engaged in foreplay with her. What the unsteamy Starr report describes is back-seat making out, the sniffing around we resort to when we don't want to have sex, out of fear or mistrust or lack of interest or lack of commitment; it's the easiest way out of sex: when we find it hard or inessential to resist an eager suitor's advances-an offensive, painful task at which Clinton, who loves to be loved and hates to say No, who wants the approval of bimbos and geeks, geniuses and the homeless alike, is presumably not skilled at-we compromise by acting out a banal, harmless intimacy. Foreplay that doesn't lead to sex between strangers is driven by convenience, pity, apprehension, or other scruple that overrides desire; it's what we mean when we say, 'We didn't have sex, we only fooled around'; it's what teenagers do when they 'don't go all the way.' So long as a hymen is intact, a girl is a (technical) virgin, unspoiled even if she engages in Monica-style explorations. These unnecessary details merely reveal the participants to have been free adults. The President's definitions, which simply reiterate that the affair wasn't consummated, are culturally accurate.
So when all the commentators mock his evasiveness, it looks as if Washington is trying to expand our sexual accountability. It is a repressive stratagem, in sync with the ever broader definitions of rape and sexual harassment that have come through the courts in recent years and spread resentment and fear, not respect and camaraderie, among the genders. And it is morally perilous to bunch all forms of intimacy and infidelity under a single calamitous banner; it is the gravest mistake religion made in its quest for control: by equating spontaneous ejaculation, spousal sex without intention to procreate, and onanism to any other sexual infraction and calling them all mortal sins, it encourages sin. If sex with barnyard animals, necrophilia, or flagellation are equally transgressive as oral sex that ends in masturbation, the person who breaks an insignificant rule might as well break every other rule since he is already condemned; and people do, in self-punishment. It's the impetus of all addiction. And it originates with our lack of perspective and self-knowledge. There's enough guilt associated with sex as it is; sex involves too much risk-assessment and shoulders too much weight of meaning in our culture; sex is no longer a subject people simply associate with a good time. It is a critical mistake for the state to tighten the rules any further.
Furthermore, one man's truth is always another's lie, especially when one of the two has immunity and the other has too much to lose. Facts are promiscuous, capable of serving any and all ends-conflicting needs and points of view, often honestly. Facts aren't immune to the imagination. Credulity draws on the imagination, whether it involves believing in Jesus' resurrection, life on Mars, or Monica's memories. The privacy of the mind, even more than the privacy of bedroom embarrassments, is our most sacred and unassailable prerogative. Religion and society work to marshal it, to impose an approximate unity of sentiment. This is the most important struggle in history, between the organizing powers that want to fix the acceptable belief systems, morality standards, and privacy boundaries for all, and the individual minds. Democracy depends on this freedom: without it, our political actors can't support different versions of reality. The cautioning myth that reignites this struggle is that one corrupt man can activate the wrath of God, one sinner can blight the land: it's the story of Oedipus, Jonah, Judas, what justifies the artifice of the scapegoat. Now a cannibalist machinery has put Bill in the role of scapegoat in whom all our recent social trends converge in destructive extremes, and demand a lucid and edifying resolution.
The first dramatic climax came on August 17th with Bill's unrepentant apology. He didn't read the penitent speech his aides hoped would isolate Starr. He stood up for his beliefs-alone, vulnerable, angry, utterly believable, spin-free. The unappeased talking heads declared it 'the most embarrassing four minutes in the history of the American Presidency' and his least effective public moment. Those who still demanded a massive premature mea culpa a la Nixon's Checkers speech were shocked: in his next attempt at an expanded apology, he invoked Nelson Mandela, implying he too was now fighting for freedom-our freedom to fuck in peace. On August 20th, proving false his detractors who argued his presidency was crippled and lacking in moral authority to respond to an emergency decisively, he approved the biggest anti-terrorist attack in U.S. history; it was another sign he would not be emasculated. That was followed by the denouement of his grudging grovelthon and Washington's pompously dense dismissal of each contrition as insufficient or insincere. But on August 17th, after the non-apology, he had a 62% job approval rating; 72% of the public disapproved of resignation, 69% of impeachment, 63% considered his affair a private concern. When 'Slick Willie' spoke from the heart, choosing honesty over faux-earnesty despite the political costs, he transcended his limits.
'WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING INVESTIGATING YOUR PRIVATE LIFE ANYWAY?' AUTHOR DAVID BROCK, IN HIS APOLOGY TO THE PRESIDENT, ESQUIRE, MARCH 1998
A drama built around a government's snooping into an aging man's trinket-giving and oral near-quickies is doomed to flop. Its only redeeming aspect is this: the more Clinton is vilified by the self-styled moral police and by peers jumping off his sinking ship, the more he is supported by a steadfast public. It's an extraordinary beauty in the heart of darkness: the rare instance when the electorate is wiser than its pundits and won't be brainwashed. It's an unprecedented disparity: normally cynical politicians and commentators demand Clinton's head on a platter, pushing forward an unethical investigation akin to a Mafia turf-war; while the generally unsubtle and overwhelmingly religious public is forgiving, level-headed, and eager to keep Clinton's incubi where they belong: within his own soul. For months sophisticated experts have expressed horror and shock and indignant dismay at Clinton's sordid lie, substituted psychology for politics, confused sex with life, disregarded the history of presidential adulteries, acted naive and awed, to no avail.
The public insists that sex is private. The President's approval ratings remain at all-time highs, nearly 70%. The people give their leaders a reality check: a guy masturbating is a guy masturbating, whether he rests his back in the West Wing or not. There is nothing traumatizing in it. This is not Nixon bugging political opponents' offices, or using the FBI, CIA, IRS, and secret police to blackmail enemies, or approving 300,000 illegal wiretaps, or slandering innocents. This is not Reagan and Bush lying under oath about national policy matters in the Iran-Contra hearings, a malfeasance for which they could be jailed. This is not Truman initiating an unconstitutional war in Korea and calling it police action. This is not LBJ entering the White House worth $6 million and leaving worth $60 million, or engineering the fictional Gulf of Tonkin incident that sent half a million men to Vietnam. This is not JFK sleeping with an East German spy and Sam Giancana's moll in the White House, peccadilloes that could qualify for treason. This is not Chappaquidick. This is Lyndon Johnson bragging that he fucked more women in six months in the White House over the kitchen sink than did the famously predatory Kennedy, who submerged his call-girls in the White House pool at the point of orgasm to intensify his sensation by their spasms of near-drowning. This is Nixon inviting hookers to the White House. This is FDR dying in the arms of Lucy Mercer, his mistress of 25 years, Ike sleeping with Kay Sommersby, his W.W.II chauffeur, Bush keeping a secret paramour. This is: a Double Standard. So Starr's report is irrelevant. What Clinton did or didn't do in bed is not a national issue. Washington is out of touch with the average citizen: the fact is it would demoralize us if he were punished for a blowjob.
The public knows that a man doesn't get to be president by upholding a strident morality: he must bend the rules, bribe and handshake, wheel and deal, and sustain enormous pressure and stress any way he can. Sex is the best way humanity has always known to relax and feel optimistic and transcendent. The public knows most men would give into a thoughtless, ego-boosting quickie with an eager starry-eyed groupie, and most would try to deny it if questioned in public. If one's wife is enmeshed in politics and travels the globe meeting women and one's circle consists of adrenaline-driven, anxious colleagues, a young, presumably uncorrupted nominal outsider can provide a momentary sense of an oasis of small-time real life and pseudoromantic cleansing that a powerful insulated man needs. What an intern could give Clinton was unpoliticized devotion, idealizing appreciation, vacuous chatter. He didn't think; he had more important things to think about. Most of us don't think when it comes to sex, or else we're sex-professionals or frigid or inauthentic and manipulative. The public knows sex is not subject to rules of logic; it's the nature of libidinal desire to appear to be outside our control: our genes arrange it to keep us fornicating at optimum capacity; a lack of self-control when it comes to sex is natural and doesn't imply weakness in any other aspect of daily life; otherwise, we would all be dysfunctional.
Elected politicians have never been moral role models for children; their job is to govern, appear strict and straight while they lie and cheat as the national interests require them to. Carter was an ineffective President because he was too moral and was elected only because he came after Nixon. Politicians can't be discriminating in their relations with others; they need to be liked. Like latter-day Pygmalions they create their object of desire as they meet it. They must be equally drawn to young and old, sharp and dim, lady and servant, virgin and whore, blonde and brunette. A good president has the personality of a sex addict: he is able to compartmentalize, stay focused on the big picture rather than side-tracked by details, take enormous risks, keep secrets, objectify individuals for the welfare of the whole, be convincing, controlling, wily. It's not for ordinary artless people, nor for extraordinary, enlightened purists. So we grant extra moral perks to those who are fit to stand the tremendous strain the job involves. Saints belong in the desert or monasteries or the Himalayas for good reason: secular society does not nourish moral excellence and clarity.
The public is more empathetic, nuanced, and experienced than its interpreters credit it. Those who explain its apathy by the strong economy disdain human nature: people know that outside our professional garb, we all pick our noses and play with ourselves and have dirty thoughts and orgasms; biology is the common denominator that unites priests and atheists, presidents and jailbirds, housewives and moguls. The democracy of the body is that sex renders vulnerable people of all kinds. Bill didn't touch Monica in his persona of U.S. President, but as the unofficial person who gets unanticipated hemorrhoids and bad dreams and anxiety attacks and hard-ons; the guy who broke through the persona and said: 'I've never been so alone; I did this to myself.' Loss and hurt and personal conflict are central to any emotional life. Ambiguity is inherent in human relationships. There is no rule of moral conduct more important than mutual generosity and respect for the superabundance of life. And this we learn, and improve on, by trial and error.
We know it's small sport for the hunter whose bird perches on the muzzle of his gun: Monica perched on Clinton's idle gun, and Clinton perched on his enemies' ready guns. After $54 million dollars and three years of exhaustive hounding sanctioned by Congress, we have a wad of sperm on a blue dress and a white lie told by a man who didn't want to embarrass his office and himself, his wife and his lover: none of this is remotely shocking. Only the shame, contempt, and personal ruin that still accompany the public exposure of this most ordinary breach are shocking. He has been indiscriminate, but his indiscretion does not approximate Starr's; it's more virtuous to lie about one's consensual sex life than to muckrake another's consensual sex life. 80% of the public, and 60% of conservatives, denounced the decision to televise Clinton's grand jury testimony. We disdain Starr's public leakage more than Clinton's private leakage. What we find more prurient is not what Clinton did but our being forced against our will to know so much about it.
Bill's stubborn high approval ratings suggest a second, more private, response to the show: it's heartening to know we can be imperfect and still make it to the top. And though Oliver North (a self-avowed patriot who lied to Congress under oath) calls this the Viagra administration, the good news is the President doesn't need drugs to perform sexually. Time called Clinton the nation's 'Libido in Chief.' In evolutionary terms, Clinton would be a disgrace if he had castrated his sex drive, thereby symbolically castrating America. He is our prototype, a personification of America's rapacious appetite. As our youngest president since JFK, Clinton is a Dionysian fertility symbol, a superstud, a bold embodiment of the longing for passion, and now an incarnate criticism of social hypocrisy. His lust vindicates aging babyboomers, makes them feel potent, desirable, impulsive, undomesticated, young. It's good for the country if our President is well-laid. Too much self-control inevitably backfires. It's not good for the country to harass its Head of State during formal visits to nations whose people are threatened with civil war and hunger with Kafkaesque inquiries about where he put his penis. We were much better off when he was getting blowjobs.
For nine months the moral of this tragedy has been that the American public is not interested in whether or not Clinton lied about ten counts of gratuitous tepid hanky-panky. We're all lied to in life every day. We know a harmless personal lie in no way implies a man is dishonest in his job. We all have passing tempers and demons. We've always been taught to keep sex secret. We find it normal to lie about an affair: secrecy is the definition of an affair. We know morality isn't defined by sexual behavior alone, or even primarily. We know no collective public response to private lives is possible. America is saying: no more. Sex can't be a public issue any more.
IF YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE BEEN A VICTIM OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT BY THE PRESIDENT, WE WANT TO HELP. CALL THIS TOLL-FREE NUMBER NOW: 1-888-H-A-R-A-S-S-U." Harper's, April 1998
In the postmodern era, as our sense of sin has become increasingly irrelevant, America's inherent puritanism has turned back on itself and is pared down to its naked core: voyeurism. If voyeurism is the titillating invasion of other people's privacy-a loss of our civilized boundaries-then in the 90s news is the invasion of a public person's privacy with impunity. The public likes the vicarious thrill Clinton's persecution gives to our repressed, workaholic culture. In this way, voyeurism has become the best form of safe sex. But the underlying .. is that voyeurism is used to .. The possibility of Clinton committing perjury is the flimsy euphemism a culture that still holds on to appearances is using for a much larger project: the sexualization of our public life-the use of sex as a distraction from serious political issues-and the desexualization of our private life-the use of ..as a warning. These persecutions are no longer unusual, nor are they mere media blips; they are individual tragedies that also implicitly serve a pseudo-orgiastic social purpose: they warn the public away from the thirst for sexual satisfaction and initiative. They are moral lessons meant to evoke pity and fear in the populace and to place its sturdiest and most precarious impulses under submission. A traditionally female disorder, hysteria, which consumed the Puritans in 1692, is sweeping across the 'feminized' military, and, through the media, it is contaminating the nation.
The massive and meandering Paula Jones investigation, sanctioned by the Supreme Court and led by the special prosecutor at the cost of millions of dollars of public money is the final proof of the legitimization of sexual prying. The prurient input of the media, which purportedly only give the public what it wants, but in fact create the vicarious excitement and infectious urgency by labeling the flimsy lawsuit 'presidency in crisis' and putting it first on the news every day for months, is undeniably mercenary. Capitalism is turning both politics and sex into Coliseum-style sport.
Clinton's approval-rating high-an average of 79% at home and 98% abroad-shows that the public doesn't believe that a president's private sex life directly affects his professional abilities. We agree that he should give everything above the waist to his country, but below the waist is his own business. I actually think that his approval rating is an unofficial result of the presidential sex scandal. Liberals who thought him too cautious and calculating now defend him against the right-wing conspiracy/ witchhunt against him and see him as forced to inaction. Women who found him charmingly empathetic may now fantasize about a dalliance with him, with good cause. Young voters can find him cool, a rebel even. White-trash fanatics, conservative-voting golfers and hard-core businessmen who were biased against him now see him as a 'real man', and take up the anti-sexual harassment-gone-overboard cause in his name. Anyone who .. And a charge of sexual impropriety became an effective weapon to kill off a rival. Jealousy, revenge, vanity, or Iago-style sportsmanship can now spur an accusation of sexual indiscretion. Anyone can call 1-800-903-4241 and ruin the career of a General. All this is transforming the proud warrior culture into a 'he said, he tried, he gestured' public sideshow. Promising officers with sexually colorful histories leave the military to avoid risking defacement; those who stay out of loyalty or necessity, worry over who in their past will retroactively do them in. And pretty much everyone can .. the indignity of having the nation's President questioned on the witness stand about where he put his arms, mouth, or penis at any given time in his past and whom he said hello to. America's aging babyboomers feel vindicated by their president's dalliances with young eager bimbos who adore and idolize him, work for him for no pay and are all too anxious, we can sense, to be intimate with him. We also sense, silently, that a man and president cannot be expected to refuse sexual favors without losing his manhood and self-respect. In evolutionary terms, Clinton would be a loser if he had castrated his sex drive, and thereby symbolically castrated America. Instead, Clinton makes us feel that age doesn't affect virility; he makes middle-aging boomers feel potent, desirable, impulsive, young. This is why the efforts by China to influence the U.S. elections with soft money were never treated as an impeachment-size White House crisis, whereas the potential cover-up of a consensual blowjob still is. Clinton is the victim of reverse sexual-harassment.
The lesson is that the American public is not interested in whether or not Clinton lied under oath about getting a blowjob from a starry-eyed intern with big lips, hips and tits. We all secretly know that most men would give in to a thoughtless, ego-boosting quickie of some sort with an obsessed groupie in a weak moment, we know that most of us in his position would try to deny it if questioned in public, we know we've always been taught to hide our sex lives, and we know that such a harmless lie in no way implies that a man is dishonest in his job.
Sexual harassment has become a reactionary cause and must be curbed and rethought. The Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio encapsulates the climate of sexual frustration and terror we live in. Having shed the stranglehold of sin, modern America is devising more sexual rules than were proscribed at any time in this century, all in the name of liberation. These mushrooming draconian guidelines regarding the private desires of citizens mark the reincarnation of America's inherited puritanism in a modern, tolerable garb. In the postmodern era America's puritanism is pared down to its naked core: voyeurism, the titillating invasion of others' privacy, the apogee of repression. This is the tide that Clinton's impeachment can turn around.
What has blurred the difference between consensual fun, flirtation and harassment is the idea that sex in any unequal power relation entails coercion. But any relations among lovers, just as between friends, relatives, colleagues, are unavoidably unequal, mutable, and explosive. All seduction is coercion. The only reason to purge any consensual intimacy is a deep-seated prejudice that sex is the beast whose containment is necessary for the good of society-a bigotry our society has long disproved. The peeping-Tom politics of intimidation that started in Congress with a pubic hair on a Coke can has now come full circle to die in Congress.
I DON'T KNOW IF THIS IS A TRAGEDY OR FARCE." RICHARD NIXON ON A TAPED PHONE CONVERSATION
Morality is the stock-in-trade of religion and tyranny. As an abstraction, it has a very thin referent in life, like normalcy or duty. The push to force a collective judgment on an individual's most intimate thoughts or acts is, literally, totalitarian, for there is no standard or sane response. Only dictators and fanatics presume to circumscribe right and wrong private life and then take it upon themselves to enforce it, uncowered by the onus of their righteousness. A common pre-coup tactic is to stage a bogus ideological battle around a moral issue, and use it to undo the results of an election. At the very moment the American experiment with democracy is unchallenged and triumphant in the world, it is internally undermined by a government that has exceeded its proper bounds by imposing the public sphere on the private. It is excesses like these the Founding Fathers intended to exclude by assigning Congress a deliberative role as a guarantee that political contrivances centered on presumed character flaws cannot override two binding election judgments.
There are more signs of danger: Few people vote. The rhetoric of 'repentance' and 'moral justice' is insidiously reintroduced in our national discourse, as the President holds prayer breakfasts and weekly sessions with ministers in charge of his 'discipline and salvation.' Any formal mix of governance and religion is menacing to democracy. The country's intellectuals remain passive; having encouraged the public discourse to enter the private arena, they refuse to admit their project has been co-opted and deplore Clinton's lies rather than argue on behalf of his sexual freedom. No one is organizing marches in protest, though it was this naive self-righteousness that led America into Vietnam. In fascism, the intellectuals are made inconsequential and opportunists become active, loud and clear. The media is increasingly unliberal. And rather than admit defeat, crucible-style ethic polemicists like Bill Bennett blame Clinton's survival on the public's moral malaise and argue that the public must be made to resume its moral judgment and compass.
What has just happened in America is this: when an oligarchy couldn't defeat the President by popular vote or ideology, they went after his character and turned their invasions of his privacy into an issue of public policy in order to establish his lack of moral authority; ignoring the polls, they repeated the accusations daily, month after month, turning the screws tighter in the hope of wearing out the public; they may eventually succeed if, eager to end the torturous barrage of nastiness, we ignore the serious and still abstract long-term consequences of this drama. They are the enemy: avenging control-freaks who itch to revive punitive divorce laws and sodomy and oral sex statutes, criminalize abortion, censor libraries, movies, the Net, and blame it all on God's will.
Everyone knows-no one better than fascists-that a President's 'moral authority' derives from his political power. The argument over 'moral authority' is a semantic lie: it is Clinton's legal political authority that is being not very legally challenged. The legion of his critics who claim he's lost his moral authority conveniently forget that he had none both times he was elected; in a twist of logic, they blame him for privately disrespecting the office they disrespect by disseminating inconsequential gossip. Hitler became chancellor by arguing that Germany had lost its moral authority in the world, and Stalin argued the same regarding Trotsky; his phrase of choice was 'moral turpitude.' This is how totalitarian thinking infiltrates a culture: by attacking the private morality of its political adversaries long enough and loud enough to reconstitute the public's vision of reality. And the moment it loses its sense of history, American democracy will have failed.
When Nixon resigned-notably without partisan bickering or public dumping of his impeachment material-Gerald Ford said, "The nightmare is over." Nixon had a 20% popularity rating. The country was in unison. This is not the catharsis America can expect if Clinton resigns; even those who see him as a lewd lame duck would rather have a president they regret than vindicate preacher-politicians who would legislate and assail the most intimate acts of life-sex and religion. Catharsis is crucial to a tragedy; without it, we're left with farce, with no conclusion, and fester. If an election is undone because the President had adulterous oral sex with a willing adult, if the President is forced to resign because he didn't admit putting his tongue on a pussy, it will be the end of the Republic as we know it. It will haunt and tarnish our politics, our psyche, our self-esteem, our sexuality. It may plunge us, quite ceremoniously, into the end of postmodernity and something akin to a moral apocalypse: a moral bankruptcy or civil mutiny whose fervor may exceed governmental check. This is the threat that moved Nelson Mandela, the leader with most moral authority, to meddle in American politics and vehemently support Clinton. The outside world is so distressed by all this, it may counteract by offering Clinton the Nobel peace prize.
The President will be impeached if the lynchmob mentality that has swept the House can't be stopped. The fusion of fear, rage, and greed, of the pack instinct and bunker conformity that the weakening of a President has unleashed among his foes and courtiers and dauphins seems irreversible. No one is in control. They will get him simply because they can. It is the hysterical slaying of the Chief, a primal, theological ritual as old as the Stone Age, a savage process once meant to ensure fertility of nature. By now, that original impulse (we will give you our best son, if you give us prosperity) has become corrupted (the King is killed, long live the new King), but no less potent: it still marks a turning moment in history, the dawn of a social decline and possible rebirth.
The Senate will probably be reluctant to impeach him for his libido and take on the burden of setting such precedent: if a witchhunt succeeds, politicians will never have a free sex life, like Catholic priests. But if Clinton is sacrificed, very soon history will exonerate him. His downfall will be his triumph. He will be more popular than ever. That is the role of a tribal scapegoat: he personifies the unsolvable pathologies and inherent flaws of his time. He brings them to the foreground so that everyone can look at themselves and recognize their own guilt, self-hatred, hypocrisy, lethargy, arrogance, cowardice and potentially transcend them. The need to periodically consume scapegoats and cleanse our most harmful impulses is fundamental. Society symbolically heaps its worst frustrations and inequities upon him and collectively destroys him, then, humbled by his unwarranted collapse, collectively worships him. His sacrifice unites the people. Such a ritual sacrifice is usually needed when the direction and energy of a society feels itself ready to shift; it registers a disturbance in the status quo: an end and a beginning.
The Clinton drama is drawing America into a mythic realm beyond the one experienced in Watergate; the absence of any crime in Clinton's case makes his scandal a Faustian confrontation played out over America's psyche. Millennia usually end in chaos, before they bring a sea change. But if it were up to the electorate, there would be no need for an upheaval: Congress would have intervened and ended the President's defilement. As far as the people are concerned, Clinton has been forgiven. After the first death, there is no other: he is free. And his public humbling has changed him in our eyes: he is no longer a mere politician. By remaining relentless regardless of his multiple confessions and acts of repentance, his accusers mythify him beyond his due. The conservative scheme to flood the country with lurid gossip and use its irresistible public appeal to reduce him into a sum of nothing more than his grossest impulses and render him ineffectual by stripping him down to the flat cartoon of a satyr, has backfired. He has become a statesman. Every gesture he makes, every word he utters, is symbolic. He has, ironically, risen above politics through sex. And he grows larger every day, a representative of the American soul.
He's not the first, nor the last, and they, and we, know that too.
"IT WAS JUST THAT HE WAS SCARED AND I ENJOYED THAT,' MONICA SAID TO LINDA TRIPP. "ISN'T THAT DISGUSTING? I ENJOYED IT." (THE STARR TAPES)
We all know, or suspect, that we elected Bill Clinton because he is sexy. We all know that Bill Clinton is a successful and indestructible politician because he understands the importance of entertainment, intuiting that, in America today, showbiz is the bedrock of any success. Bill's charismatic empathy is that he humanizes politics. The ideal celebrity, he is accessible, adaptable, fallible, self-destructive, yet bigger-than-life; he doesn't shy away from controversy, risk, the quotidian, or the absurd. He can conduct statesman's duties with dignity and zest, even as 'Primary Colors', 51/2' inches, and the mushrooming Clinton sex jokes in offices and on the Net have been turning his libido into a caricature. After all, Clinton brought sexiness back into politics. And a President cannot be discriminating in his relations with others; he needs to be liked. So, like a latter-day Pygmalion, he creates his object of desire as he speaks and proceeds. His lust is for danger and for victory. When he's seducing a woman-of-the-moment, he's primarily seducing himself. He likes getting people to go beyond what they're supposed to do. His empathy and compartmentalization is his magic phallus, his mating game. Without words and emoting, he'd be emasculated and he would never have become 'the most powerful man in the world'.
The numbers are on his side. On his campaign travels and presidential visits and in his previous gubernatorial career, he has physically touched hundreds of thousands of people. In this context, to have sexual liaisons with a dozen or two dozen of them is not outside the norm. His numbers are modest in proportion to his exposure to temptation and reveal the size of his fear of our sex police. But even in their modesty, his numbers, by being outside the average man's experience, vindicate America's sexuality. Despite the hypocrisies of his moralizing political enemies (Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Oliver North, the Washington establishment) and the bloodlust of the Mellon family sycophants and the psychotic Richard Klayman, an overwhelming majority of adult life the world over think less than nothing about his half-way adultery. America harbors sinners. Lying about oral sex never cost anybody anything in this land.
And in the process of all this sexodrama, he's left behind even his hero J.F.K. in the macho sweepstakes: Clinton is now the sexiest president in U.S. history.
Why Clinton's Foreign Policy Shows He Is Good In Bed
